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With the exception of a few scattered studies carried out in the 1940s and 1950s, the mining studies will not emerge as a coherent domain until the early 1970s. In this essay, I explore the trajectory of anthropology in the area as well as the ideas that shaped it. With mining often being in-between the rural and the industrial environments, the mining studies will help ethnography to get closer to industrial landscapes, scarcely explored until then. The notion of culture will be key for authors such as Harris, Nash or Taussig, and the mining culture will often be portrayed by them as stemming from the confrontation of local cultures and colonial powers. In fact, cultural synchretism will remain a recurrent theme within mining studies until the need to face developmentalism leads to the emergence of the concept of post-development in the 1980s. This model, however, will reach its exhaustion around the early 2000s, leading to the development of different approaches.